1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to servers and computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates determining a server configuration based on an execution profile of an application.
2. Related Art
The recent explosive growth of electronic commerce has led to a proliferation of web sites on the Internet selling products as diverse as toys, books and automobiles, and providing services, such as insurance and stock trading. Millions of consumers are presently surfing through web sites in order to gather information, to make purchases, or purely for entertainment.
The increasing traffic on the Internet often places a tremendous load on the servers that host web sites. Some popular web sites receive over a million “hits” per day. In order to process this much traffic without subjecting web surfers to annoying delays in retrieving web pages, it is necessary to distribute or load balance the traffic between multiple server nodes, so that the multiple server nodes can operate in parallel to process the traffic. In addition, it is extremely important to correctly size each server node to handle the traffic that it will encounter.
Server sizing is usually done by trial and error, if it is done at all. Currently, computer manufacturers publish sizing guides which are, at best, crude estimates based on various computers performing various workloads. Provided that the various vendors are comparing comparable computing device configurations and identical workloads, this model would work well for comparison purposes between vendors. However, currently there is no known tool to assist a customer to find the optimal server configuration for a given application. Typically, vendors try to sell servers which surpass the customers' needs to allow an adequate cushion, but this practice results in a higher overall cost to the customer.
Unanticipated demand over a short period of time can result in an unresponsive or non-functioning server. For example, an unexpected event, such as a news bulletin, might drive the traffic for a certain web application to levels well above average. Current sizing guides do not reveal how a server performs under an intense load for a fixed period of time, nor do they reveal the maximum load the server can handle before it becomes unresponsive. This information is essential in choosing the optimal server configuration for a given application.
What is needed is a method and an apparatus for properly sizing a server configuration based on characteristics of an application that will be running on the server configuration.